Indeed. I was completely miserable in high school, instead getting my dose of social interaction by visiting a hackerspace. Genuinely believe that was the only thing that kept me from going insane at that point in life.
Now of course interacting with people that are twice my age during my teens has produced some bonus problems in my social skills, but the alternative here is feeling completely isolated, not somehow magically learning to be normal™ person™ as many educators seem to think.
Ah, that's it then. I figured they would likely have a passcode, since the "someone steals my phone on public transport" threat vector is a pretty obvious one even for non-tech users. Unfortunately the thread got nuked before I got to read it more...
Modern Android actually does support disk encryption. And the Pixels even have TPMs that should (?) safeguard the key, preventing offline brute forcing the unlock pattern. I wonder what happened here that this did not work...